Project AVoCet aims to provide a global database of well-documented, downloadable bird sounds in aid of environmental and ornithological research, conservation, education, and the identification and appreciation of birds and their habitats.

The wargames offered by the OverTheWire community can help you to learn and practice security concepts in the form of fun-filled games.
To find out more about a certain wargame, just visit its page linked from the menu on the left.

In this blog post I'll aim to get you at least partially familiar with Software Defined Radio, the Realtek RTL2832U chipset, and provide Backtrack 5 R2 setup and usage instructions so that you can easily get off to a good start.

Open Music Archive is a collaborative project, initiated by artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White, to source, digitise and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings. The archive aims to distribute these recordings freely, form a site of exchange of knowl

Erlang is a language that has been and is used for various types of applications. Unfortunately many developers don't feel comfortable with the functional programming paradigm that Erlang is built upon. To help you get started on your way as a to-be Erlang developer here are some tools that may help you

The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence - in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be - including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books.

Cities and Memory is a global field recording & sound art work that records both the present reality of a place, but also its imagined, alternative counterpart – remixing the world, one sound at at time.

Compressors have become more than just gain control units, they can be just as important as EQs in shaping a sound and sometimes even more so. For the mathematically inclined, a compressor works with a transfer function, or in plain speak, it changes its input in a predictable way. The controls of a compressor help specify this transfer function.

This resource has been designed for composers, musicians, researchers and anyone who has an interest in sound design and musical composition using granular synthesis.

It features music, forums, software and guides on what granular synthesis is and how it can be used for creating music and soundscapes. It also covers control mechanisms and instrument building using granular synthesis as a sound source.

In 2006, I moved to New York and started working for David Karp doing web development for various media companies. That fall, in a brief gap before starting a new client, David said that we were going to make a prototype of an idea he’d had for a while. He had already bought the domain: tumblr.com, because it was an easy platform for publishing tumblelogs.

Data compression is the art of reducing the number of bits needed to store or transmit data. Compression can be either lossless or lossy. Losslessly compressed data can be decompressed to exactly its original value. An example is 1848 Morse Code. Each letter of the alphabet is coded as a sequence of dots and dashes. The most common letters in English like E and T receive the shortest codes. The least common like J, Q, X, and Z are assigned the longest codes.

Korg released a firmware update for the monotribe. It's an audio file that you play to the sync input of the monotribe. Interesting, yeah? Let's take a look at the content of the file and see how far we can get towards disassembly. This would be the first steps towards a custom firmware for the korg monotribe.

Exploring the gap between what we do as developers and the reasons we got started, it's not hard to realise that while we love what we do, we're not always doing what we love. How often do we simply sit down to code and see where we're going to end up? The answer to the gap between what we do and why we do it seems to be hacking. Outside the constraints of the working environment developers explore the technology available and indulge the programmers brain. This talk looks at the open source, real time, graphic, arts-based programming language, Pure Data, as a tool to make music that writes itself, synthesizers that play data and audible cellular automata.

Part One - Scales, Note Numbers, Roman Numerals
Part Two - I, IV, and V Chords, Keys, Chords in D
Part Three - ii, iii, and vi Chords, The Simple Map
Part Four - Chord Variations, Complex Chords
Part Five - Secondary Chords and the Big Map
...

This is a follow up tutorial to the "Beginners quick start guide to making music in Puredata". This will be useful for people who want to make music using Pd and synthesised sounds. In this exercise we are going to build six synthesisers and connect them up to play a piece of music. Again we will be using nothing but Puredata so make you have it installed. Each synthesiser will use a different synthesis method. We will continue to focus on electronic "techno" music and not be fussy about our synthesis model or the accuracy and realism of the sounds we make, instead we are going to build quite open ended synths with a range of timbres to explore. For each synth we will quickly discuss its basic principle and harmonic structure and then proceed to think about its interface and how we would like to use it. Finally we will build a control structure to test the synth and make sure it's doing what we want.

How can we capture the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software? How can understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world help us to create digital worlds? This book focuses on the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems using Processing.

Yesterday, I was at BeMyApp contest, where we had to develop something about music. After a stupid lyrics generators using markov chains and an uninteresting game in html5, I decided to code a synthesizer (A dream I had for many years, since I'm really interested in sound synthesis).

Currently your Arduino can only beep like a microwave oven. Mozzi brings your Arduino to life by allowing it to produce much more complex and interesting growls, sweeps and chorusing atmospherics. These sounds can be quickly and easily constructed from familiar synthesis units like oscillators, delays, filters and envelopes.

One of the reasons we’re covering DSP environments this month is to get more people exposed to the capabilities they can provide. If you have never used these tool sets before, we have no intention of leaving you out of the party. So, this is the first in a series of articles to help you get your feet wet. We’re going to be working with Pure Data, an environment that uses the Max language (much like MSP from Cycling 74), and is available as a free open-source tool. In this series, I’m going to walk you through the steps to build a wavetable synthesizer that will let you work from an imported sound file, has polyphonic and velocity sensitive MIDI controlled playback, ADSR envelope generation, and modulation and filtering…oh, and we’ll be able to record whatever we play in the synthesizer.

We love data, big and small and we are always on the lookout for interesting datasets. Over the last two years, the BigML team has compiled a long list of sources of data that anyone can use. It’s a great list for browsing, importing into our platform, creating new models and just exploring what can be done with different sets of data.

Multiple synthesizer projects have been done for the Arduino, but few have been able to utilize the full power of the Arduino processor. DZL from GeekPhysical wrote a 4 voice wavetable synthesizer that is one of the more advanced software based synths for the Arduino. &nbsp;It has wavetables included (sine, saw, square and triangle) and envelopes to create beats.

Nearly two years after the start of Syria's popular uprising, the conflict has evolved into a slow-moving, brutal civil war with many players and no clear end in sight. Multiple rebel groups across the country continue to fight President Bashar al-Assad's forces, using any weapons they can get their hands on. While the rebels are using many modern weapons, they've also come up with their own makeshift solutions. In these weapons workshops, anti-aircraft guns are welded to pickup trucks and armor shields are attached to machine guns and cars. Mortar shell nose cones are turned on lathes and explosives are mixed by hand. Homemade grenades are launched by jury-rigged shotguns or giant slingshots in the urban battlefields of Aleppo and Damascus. Gathered here are a few examples of the hand-built munitions of the Syrian rebels.

The universe will become extremely dark after the last star burns out. Even so, there can still be occasional light in the universe. One of the ways the universe can be illuminated is if two carbon-oxygen white dwarfs with a combined mass of more than the Chandrasekhar limit of about 1.4 solar masses happen to merge. The resulting object will then undergo runaway thermonuclear fusion, producing a Type Ia supernova and dispelling the darkness of the Degenerate Era for a few weeks.

If this is completely obvious to you, stop reading now and start getting a life. For the rest of us, it took me quite some time before i was able to parse this formula, and when i finally did, it only added to my initial confusion.

For the first time, a massive data set of 10,000 porn stars has been extracted from the world’s largest database of adult films and performers. I’ve spent the last six months analyzing it to discover the truth about what the average performer looks like, what they do on film, and how their role has evolved over the last forty years.

“Deadwood gained its notoriety in the late 19th century as a lawless gold mining town. In 1874, General Custer led an expedition to the Black Hills territory owned by the Lakota. During his search, he found gold. This started the rush and Deadwood was formed in 1876. Within 6 months Deadwood’s population reached around 4,800 people.

Have you ever wondered what defines a pop song? Well I have, and decided to find out. I gathered data from 52 Number 1 hits, the most successful from each year spanning 1960 through to 2011 as determined on the Australian pop music charts and came up with some interesting recommendations as to what technical aspects this group of songs has in common.

Quite a few people have been asking for a status update of LXC in Ubuntu as of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. This post is meant as an overview of the work we did over the past 6 months and pointers to more detailed blog posts for some of the new features.

Containers are a lightweight virtualization technology. They are more akin to an enhanced chroot than to full virtualization like Qemu or VMware, both because they do not emulate hardware and because containers share the same operating system as the host. Therefore containers are better compared to Solaris zones or BSD jails. Linux-vserver and OpenVZ are two pre-existing, independently developed implementations of containers-like functionality for Linux. In fact, containers came about as a result of the work to upstream the vserver and OpenVZ functionality. Some vserver and OpenVZ functionality is still missing in containers, however containers can boot many Linux distributions and have the advantage that they can be used with an un-modified upstream kernel.

In April of 2007 I accepted a three month posting in Iraq working for the American IT consulting firm BearingPoint.

I arrived in Baghdad on the 2nd of April 2007 where my main job was to develop spending reports from the computer system used within the Ministry of Finance.

On the 29th of May, 2007 around one hundred Iraqi police officers from the Ministry of Interior entered the building and took away myself and four British guards.

For six months I was moved around meeting up with the British guards. In December of 2007 I was separated from the other Britons and was held with two Americans. In June of 2007 I was transported back to Baghdad and this was the last time I had contact with any of the other hostages.

In May of 2009 the number two commander of the militia (Laith Al Khazlli) was released from US custody in exchange for the bodies of two of the British guards. In September over one hundred militia were released in exchange for the body of one of the guards.

On the 30th of December 2009, 946 days (or 2 years, 7 months & 1 day) after I was captured, I was released in exchange for the militia leader Qais Al Khazlli. The last of the hostages bodies were eventually handed over in early 2012.

When it comes to programming languages, Arthur Whitney is a man of few words. The languages he has designed, such as A, K, and Q, are known for their terse, often cryptic syntax and tendency to use single ASCII characters instead of reserved words. While these languages may mystify those used to wordier languages such as Java, their speed and efficiency has made them popular with engineers on Wall Street.